A TIME FOR HEROES

This is an over-written comic adventure about an aviator and bootleger in 1923 Arizona who falls for the obligatory beautiful girl, gets involved with a crackpot inventor, designs a new kind of plane, protects a boy from his estranged father, etc. Published in 1987, it has since fallen into obscurity. Books in Motion here dusts it off for what it calls "a dramatic reading" by Michael Taylor. Taylor has the authentic twang of the Southwest in his voice and is great at playing funny codgers. His approach seems to telegraph, "Don’t take this silly stuff too serious; I ain’t." It's as if he had nothing better to do than read casually aloud from the first book he found at hand. This is just the lazy sort of book that yields to this kind of treatment. Y.R. © AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine [Published: AUG/SEP 00]